In Honeyglue, the parents of a dying twentysomething stand in their living room and try to talk their way through their agony. They want their daughter dead and out of her pain â€” no, they want to die instead of her â€” no, they want to do something, but nothing can be done. The exchange, with all its awkward pauses and its rise and fall of emotion, takes up perhaps two minutes but feels much longer. The language is strange, stilted, grasping. It doesnâ€™t sound like the way normal people talk, but these arenâ€™t normal people; they are unwilling tenants of a land called Our Daughter Has Terminal Cancer, a place full of derangement and grief.

This is not a perfect movie. Parts of it are straight-up terrible. But those are the parts that grew on me, because they attempt something, and the movie fearlessly works its time-honored trope â€” dying young woman falls in love â€” in order to illuminate and to explore weirder corners. The woman, Morgan (Adriana Mather), meets Jordan (Zach Villa) in a nightclub. She has gone there alone on her birthday, telling her parents she was at a movie. Jordan, a sardonic crossdresser, steals her wallet, then thinks better of it after a bee stings him. Jordan is putting together a kidsâ€™ book about a bee who falls in love with a dragonfly, and heâ€™s the bee, and Morgan is his dragonfly.

I believed in the affection that developed between them, because the actors have a tender, unstable, witty rapport. Morganâ€™s dad, a former detective, distrusts Jordan on sight and is implausibly rude to him; I agreed to accept that as the fatherâ€™s way of trying to protect his daughter from whatever hurt he can spare her. But Jordan is for real; he turns out to be Morganâ€™s perfect gentle knight, albeit one in a skirt and Louise Brooks wig. Jordan lives in a tent on an apartment building roof; his presence there is tolerated by a junkie acquaintance (Fernanda Romero) who is pointlessly vicious to him, and who is connected to ethnic baddies to whom he owes money (which he borrowed for art school). This thread of the movie is ludicrous and needed to go.

Morgan and Jordan soon get married, after he shaves his head out of solidarity with her, and their honeymoon is extended and sometimes feels padded. Thereâ€™s a truly terrible sub-subplot in which Jordan seems to have kidnapped a doctor â€” though we donâ€™t see it happen and donâ€™t know how it was accomplished â€” so that the doctor can be on call in case of emergency, I guess. Itâ€™s an idiotic thing for Jordan and the movie to do, and it has no consequences. This detour more or less kills the film.

But before it dies, it has a bizarre life. I respected the difficulty of many scenes. When the couple go to visit Jordanâ€™s mom (a fine turn by Amanda Plummer), it feels almost as if the writer-director, James Bird, gave Plummer a basic outline and invited her to run with the scenario â€” you havenâ€™t seen your son in a decade, you thought sure he was gay, and here he is married to a dying girl. Like Jordan, Bird has Native American ancestry, and he has a simple, unstressed and unfaked sympathy for the outsider that a more polished tearjerker like The Fault in Our Stars couldnâ€™t quite reach. (If anyone is still going to adapt Sherman Alexieâ€™s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Bird has the chops and the heart for it.) Honeyglue â€” the title refers to a plot point in Jordanâ€™s book â€” has its bad and pompous moments, but it also feels lived-in and genuine.

I could see why these two cared for each other, and I cared for them. That is far from anything to sneeze at these days.